Climate wars: Crikey gets the point about fighting the denial movement

The main problem appears to be that many of the non-scientists in the environment movement did a bad job of sounding like authoritative scientific voices. This was compounded by the fact that many of the authoritative climate science voices were unprepared for the personal and political vitriol that the sceptics were willing to throw at them.

But just because you are losing a fight doesn’t mean it can’t be won. Rather, it might mean you need to change strategy, tactics, personnel, or all of the above.

The strategic error that continues to haunt the environment movement is the decision to counter the sceptics’ message of “doubt” with a message of “certainty”. Such an approach was neither intellectually honest nor politically effective. It ignored the inconvenient truth that science is never “certain” and it placed the onus on the environment movement to have all of the answers, to all of the questions that the climate sceptics could think up. If you have ever seen a scientist try and explain the chronological dispersion of carbon isotopes in a 10-second news grab you will know what I am talking about.

Ironically, if those from the environment movement had themselves embraced the product of doubt they could have taken the sceptics head-on without legitimising the sceptics’ often bizarre theories.

The environment movement fought the wrong war.

And yes, this is a war.

Every time a climate change denier balks at being called “a denier” my response is “suck it up princess”.

Look at what is happening around the globe at the moment.

To quote James Hansen, climate change is here and it is worse than we thought: do you think we should be sparing the feelings of these self proclaimed “sceptics” every time they shed a few crocodile tears?

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4 thoughts on “Climate wars: Crikey gets the point about fighting the denial movement”

Speaking of war, you have to go to Jo Nova’s. She’s claiming her site has been hacked in an XSS attack that had been routed through a Defence server. I’m no computer geek but I always thought XSS “attacks” were usually rerouting type things designed to make money?

Anyway, the comment section is hilarious. Sad, but hilarious. The idiots are already claiming its some sort of orchestrated attack by the government designed to shut Jo down because of her opposition to the carbon tax.

Anthony Cox, the non-climatologist and member of the Climate Sceptics Party, under his pseudonym of Cohenite is whipping them up posting sections of Law. *sigh*

OK, lol. XSS attacks (script based) is “script kiddie stuff”, you can Google up code (note I’m not advocating illegal activities people). Most commentators on hacking/hactivism understand that government military/security attacks are far more sophisticated and generally impossible to detect. From what I can see it seems pretty straight forward and not sophisticated.

I do find the paranoia amusing, just read some of the comments:

“Would not surprise me one bit if it wasn’t the government itself.”

I suspect it is a prank or even an attempt at hacktervism? Who knows – I’ve not heard anything. From the comments of on “Waffle” who I assume is Nova’s site master it appears someone tried to destroy the data:

“And no, there was no pattern. The aim was to kill the database. I caught the attack while it was happening and locked everything up while a stocktake of the damage was taken and the security issue identified. After that, the backup button was pressed and we’re back online. I need to write a few scripts to scrape out Jo’s email inbox to restore the lost comments which, should be done sometime tonight. Nothing has been lost.”

Wouldn’t be Anonymous as I don’t think Nova is on their radar and their chatter doesn’t indicate sceptics as a specific target. Also Anon. are far more sophisticated than that.